You can now always delete instantly your own comments. If the comments are deleted by the OP, rather than by the vote process, the comment will be visible only to the OP and moderators -- high reputation users will not be able to see it.

You can now also instantly undelete your own comments if you deleted them yourself. If deleted by a moderator, or by the vote process, you can still vote to undelete.

Comments are now green if they have a rating of +10.

Added two new sorting options (newest first and oldest first)

The sorting algorithm you choose will stick until you choose another

Added the patch along with the date in replies

UI/design improvements for replies

Added downvoting to replies

Added a way to report replies to moderators

Things that are planned

A way to edit replies

Things that we are considering

A feature for moderators to convert comments to replies and vice-versa

Things that will not change

The new design for the vote arrows

The removal of reputation for casting votes

Deleted comments being at the bottom

Original Blog Post

Wowhead's commenting system has remained mostly unchanged since its first creation in 2006. While it has worked quite well there were some serious shortcomings that we tried to address:

The default sorting order is by date which means that the first comment posted will always be at the top, even if it's not the best one.

You can reply to a comment with another full blown-out comment, with the reply always shown below the parent comment. This functionality has been abused by replying to the first comment on the page with an unrelated comment in order to have the "second place" slot.

The upvote/downvote controls are very small, not immediately visible to new users and somewhat awkward to use. The comment rating number has the same problem.

With that being said I proudly announce a new commenting system with all of the aforementioned shortcomings resolved, and a lot of other changes as well!

Rating changes

The simplest and yet most beneficial change is that now comments are always ordered by rating by default so you will always see the best comment first! Many of you have also complained about the comment list being cluttered with "purged" or "deleted" comments everywhere; we took care of that as well by making deleted comments always appear at the bottom.

The rating part of the comment layout has been redesigned. It's now much bigger and in a more visible place. It's also much easier to use; it gives visual feedback on whether you have upvoted or downvoted the comment (or neither), and if you click it you can instantly get the breakdown between upvotes and downvotes.

Additionally you are now able to change your previous vote whenever you want, as many times as you want.

New feature: Comment Replies

Comment replies have been completely redesigned with a brand-new system. We want replies to be very lightweight and use little space on the page -- they are meant to be used only to "comment on the comment" such as offering advice on how to improve it, correcting small mistakes and - why not - make a small joke. We do not want them to be comments themselves.

Following this reasoning we came up with the following restrictions:

They can't be longer than 600 characters.

They can't have line breaks.

They can only use a subset of BBCode: bold, italics, underline plus links.

They can be upvoted, but not downvoted.

They are not considered "comments" by the system, so they don't give reputation, achievements, etc.

You must have at least 150 reputation before being able to use this feature.

Only up to 5 replies per comment are shown by default. A link can then be clicked to show more.

The comment replies posted with the old system have been automatically converted to the new reply system if eligible and to normal comments if not. In order to be eligible the reply must be shorter than 600 characters and must not contain any disallowed BBCode tag; it can contain line breaks, but those will be converted to spaces during the conversion.

If you find an old reply automatically converted to a comment that doesn't make sense without being associated with the comment it was replying to please report it to the moderators.

Other changes

While I was at it I also made numerous small improvements:

Comments with negative rating are no longer automatically purged. They will appear at the bottom of course, but they will still be there to be improved or deleted by the OP.

When you cast a vote on a comment you will no longer receive +1 reputation. This was decided because many users were abusing the voting feature mindlessly voting (and quite often DOWNvoting) comments in order to gain reputation, regardless of the merits of the comment itself.

When you downvote a comment you are invited to leave a reply explaining why.

Comment by Delameko

Comment by reneakazyx

If I post a comment as a reply to someone else, it doesn't show up in my user panel.And you can't down vote or vote to delete replies.

Comment by Kolhorry

on 2011-12-02T08:26:42-06:00

Nice. But why did you remove the green color from the good comments? I liked the color and it was easier to read. What if you made the sticky posts a different color than green (blue) and leave the green to the best comments.

Comment by pewpewx

on 2011-12-02T08:32:19-06:00

I would love to have the old system back.

Comment by Ashelia

on 2011-12-02T08:34:25-06:00

I would love to have the old system back.

Comments like these aren't very helpful nor constructive. It would be much appreciated if you could tell us what you dislike about this system and what you liked about the old system; simply asking for the old back when the old had some severe issues that provided us with multiple complaints per week (I believe half the feedback I handle weekly was regarding commenting in some form) doesn't help us.

We're always willing to listen and we want to know what the community is feeling--so please, don't just tell us something sucks or you dislike it. Instead, explain why so we can do something about that =)

Comment by gerakios

on 2011-12-02T08:41:13-06:00

It would be much appreciated if you could tell us what you dislike about this system and what you liked about the old system

The ability to up-vote and down-vote replies to comments was a helpful feature the enabled the site's users to distinguish relevant remarks from horse fodder. In my limited time with the new system, that is my only request or complaint. Correct me if I am wrong, but is our only course of action to report these replies, instead of down-voting them out of existence?

Also:

Comments with high rating are no longer green.

This makes me sad, as I thought the green text stood out. I trained myself to seek the green text on each page, though I suppose part of your goals with the new system to train me to read every comment, not just the green ones.

Comment by pewpewx

on 2011-12-02T08:45:28-06:00

I would love to have the old system back.

Comments like these aren't very helpful nor constructive. It would be much appreciated if you could tell us what you dislike about this system and what you liked about the old system; simply asking for the old back when the old had some severe issues that provided us with multiple complaints per week (I believe half the feedback I handle weekly was regarding commenting in some form) doesn't help us.

We're always willing to listen and we want to know what the community is feeling--so please, don't just tell us something sucks or you dislike it. Instead, explain why so we can do something about that =)

1. Why remove the highlight for comments with 10+ rating? This system makes the comment WAY easier to read, and it's much prettier than just a plain number on the left. The highlight feature is ONE of the main reasons why I use wowhead instead of other database sites, I mean, it's one of the site's SIGNATURE features, and you decide to remove it, really?

2. The big upvote/downvote arrows and the big comment rating is just a waste of space in my opinion. The old one works just fine, why change it? If the reason is because the old +/- buttons are too small then I think people should get their eyes checked.

3. I really don't like that little window that pops up EVERY TIME I downvote a comment or w/e, I mean sure I can leave a reply and such, but have it popping up every single time is kind of annoying. For friendly reminders like that, once per day is enough, anything more than that isn't gonna help remind people better.

4. This change is HUGE. I mean, after using wowhead for over 1 year I am already used to the old features. And then suddenly a big change comes and everything is different. Not saying that every change is junk, some of them are good, some are not so good. But please, next time you bring up big changes like that can you at least inform us ahead of time and give people a preview of the new system, so that they can have some "buffer time" to get used to the change before it is actually implemented?

There. If you think the above explanation is insufficient I will be more than glad to make it longer. :)

Comment by asakawa

on 2011-12-02T08:51:12-06:00

@gerakios

I don't think that's the aim of the new system (though I'm not in a position to claim that sort of thing with any authority). The opposite if anything, the new system makes it much easier to find the good and useful comments.

Green comments were those that got over 10 upvotes and 10 is a fairly arbitrary number in these cases. With the new system the comments will be ordered by rating by default so the first comment will be the "best" on on the list. Now you can keep reading down the list to find more good info and there's no more question of "how much better is a comment with 11 votes (green) than one with 9 (white)?"

I know what you mean about the green comments standing out by the way, but I think it might be worth giving this system a chance. I imagine that the green comment thing will feel far less important in a week or two.

Comment by DoctorLore

on 2011-12-02T08:51:37-06:00

Can't stand it either. It's also broken the links in the reputation page for me.

Comment by Terranell

on 2011-12-02T08:53:33-06:00

From a quickish browse around some random pages I like the new system a lot. However even though I know the top comment is the highest rated, I do miss the green colouring as this showed that not only was the comment one of the highest rated on that particular page but that a significant (10 seems too low though) number of people found it useful or insightful. Is that perhaps something that it might still be useful to denote or is it just me taking time to adapt to the new system?

Comment by CalaelenDT

on 2011-12-02T08:53:39-06:00

1. Why remove the highlight for comments with 10+ rating? This system makes the comment WAY easier to read, and it's much prettier than just a plain number on the left. The highlight feature is ONE of the main reasons why I use wowhead instead of other database sites, I mean, it's one of the site's SIGNATURE features, and you decide to remove it, really?

They removed the highlight because comments are now listed by highest rating on default, meaning all the useful/informational/funny comments are at the top. Keeping the green highlight would just make the page have a blob of green and than a blob of white comments.

That being said, I do really miss the green highlight as I do indeed think it was a big of a Wowhead trademark. In addition, for those who want to list on "Date posted", not having the green highlight means it's impossible to quickly see the high rated posts from the rest.

3. I really don't like that little window that pops up EVERY TIME I downvote a comment or w/e, I mean sure I can leave a reply and such, but have it popping up every single time is kind of annoying.

They've said it will be removed for everyone but new users a week from now.

Comment by LostDrewid

on 2011-12-02T09:17:29-06:00

I will never understand the fix-what-isn't-broken mentality. Why are replies no longer allowed to be comments in their own right? It made significant sense, and there are many thousands of examples, of replies containing extremely useful, pertinent information, but also related to the original comment in such a way that only as a reply did it make sense.

And why have you taken away the green text for good comments? Finding the important information was ever so much easier under that system. You didn't have to look for it - it was right there practically glowing at you.

There's no way to downrate or to mark a reply as out-of-date, as another thread has mentioned.

This was a huge mistake, and the test period was *not* communicated to the userbase effectively. You can see from my reputation that I use this site a lot and I have for a long time; but because I only cared about using wowhead for what it is, rather than join the community *about* wowhead, this took me entirely by surprise. Before going on vacation for Thanksgiving, I was up around 75 consecutive visits, so it certainly was not that I wasn't around to see anything. No, you simply hid any notification about this change in your forum where only a small percentage of the user base would see it.

I am extremely grateful that you took away reputation bonuses for voting - as you said, it was encouraging people to vote willy-nilly without actually reading and assessing a comment's value. I sincerely hope you've taken away reputation bonuses for successfully deleting comments - it only encouraged people to try to delete as much as possible, whether it was a good idea or not. But that is literally the only change that you've made here that is in any way a necessary change.

I'm sure I'll be labeled as a curmudgeonly whinger for this, and otherwise ignored. I'm fine with that. But somebody needed to say it, because this is damnably ridiculous.

Comment by pewpewx

on 2011-12-02T09:18:36-06:00

. I imagine that the green comment thing will feel far less important in a week or two.

It was a signature Wowhead feature, that's how important it was.At this point, all I can do is say: "R.I.P, my lovely green comments... ):"

Comment by Jessealot

on 2011-12-02T09:28:39-06:00

Is there any way to make an option to have it sort by date first and have it stay that way? I greatly prefer to read them by date posted.

Edit: I would just like to add, the most useful or informative or funny comments are NOT always the ones that are highest rated. On pages that don't get a lot of views, the comments with the most relevant and up-to-date information often only have a few up-votes, while out-dated information might have many many upvotes. This change, in my opinion (and it seems many others' too), is largely unwanted.

Comment by pewpewx

on 2011-12-02T09:32:29-06:00

I will never understand the fix-what-isn't-broken mentality. Why are replies no longer allowed to be comments in their own right? It made significant sense, and there are many thousands of examples, of replies containing extremely useful, pertinent information, but also related to the original comment in such a way that only as a reply did it make sense.

And why have you taken away the green text for good comments? Finding the important information was ever so much easier under that system. You didn't have to look for it - it was right there practically glowing at you.

There's no way to downrate or to mark a reply as out-of-date, as another thread has mentioned.

This was a huge mistake, and the test period was *not* communicated to the userbase effectively. You can see from my reputation that I use this site a lot and I have for a long time; but because I only cared about using wowhead for what it is, rather than join the community *about* wowhead, this took me entirely by surprise. Before going on vacation for Thanksgiving, I was up around 75 consecutive visits, so it certainly was not that I wasn't around to see anything. No, you simply hid any notification about this change in your forum where only a small percentage of the user base would see it.

I am extremely grateful that you took away reputation bonuses for voting - as you said, it was encouraging people to vote willy-nilly without actually reading and assessing a comment's value. I sincerely hope you've taken away reputation bonuses for successfully deleting comments - it only encouraged people to try to delete as much as possible, whether it was a good idea or not. But that is literally the only change that you've made here that is in any way a necessary change.

I'm sure I'll be labeled as a curmudgeonly whinger for this, and otherwise ignored. I'm fine with that. But somebody needed to say it, because this is damnably ridiculous.

Word, my friend.I feel the same too, regardless of the quality of the changes themselves, people who made them have FAILED at communication in the first place. I mean how would you feel if Blizzard introduces a new patch and directly implements it on live without ever letting players to have a peak at it?

Comment by danawhitaker

on 2011-12-02T09:35:38-06:00

I'm having a lot of trouble seeing the line that appears between all of the comment replies. That shade of grey is too similar to the background color, and it seems to blend in. It makes it extremely difficult to see the separation between various comments unless I put my face about two inches from the monitor.

While I see there's an option to sort by date or rating, is there a way to sort further within those? I mean, for instance, the ability to sort with the newest or oldest at the top, or the highest or least rated at the top, rather than one direction. The sorting also doesn't seem to take into account the comment reply dates, which are an extremely relevant part of the comment system.

I understand that it's not constructive to simply say that we want the old system back, if we don't like the new one. But I really don't like this new system very much at all. It's probably something I'll get used to, but as someone who's been using wowhead for many years now, I find it incredibly disconcerting. It's hard to pinpoint why I don't like it, but I'll try.

The comment system just feels very cluttered. Too much emphasis has been placed on how many votes the comment has gotten, but at the same time, the color doesn't stand out very much for that section and it just feels wrong. It doesn't feel intuitive anymore. Perhaps my perspective is skewed because I've been using the site for so long and things that seem convoluted to new users feel intuitive to me. It feels a lot like the changes that Facebook has made, which I really don't like either, with grouping comments together and things like that.

Even if you ignore everything else I've posted in this comment, please consider making the color that divides the main comment, the subcomments, and then the color of the line that divides individual subcomments something that stands out more. That's probably my biggest frustration now, and one of the things that is making the site seem cluttered to me, because it looks like everything is mashed together instead of being nicely separated like before.

Edit: Also, the date of the subcomments needs to be more prominent as well. Shoving them at the end of each subcomment means there's no static place to look for them when reading, which is irritating. The date should show up at the same place in each subcomment so that you don't have to sort through so much text in order to find it. The dates of the subcomments are relevant, and should be treated as such and put in a place that's easily accessible rather than slapped at the end of the comment as an afterthought.

Edit 2: It also appears now that from our profile page we can no longer see which comments we've commented on. I can still see my unique comments, but one of the features I valued most on this site was being able to see everything I'd commented on in the past so that I could revisit it from time to time. It's a chronology of the time I've spent in WoW, and what I've done there. Perhaps I'm missing something, and those things are still visible somehow, but I managed to remember a few things I'd posted that were comments about someone else's comment and those are not accessible through my profile page. I apologize for continuously editing this, but the more I use the site the more things I find that I want to mention.

Comment by mech6982

on 2011-12-02T10:09:24-06:00

This actually appears to be a change for the worse. I too would love to have the old system back.

I can appreciate the amount of work that went into the new system, but I feel it was almost entirely un-needed and causes more problems or ill will than was the intent.

Starting from the top down:

The default sort order of By Date was good because you could clearly see when a comment was made, and judge relevance based on that time frame. Now we have comments sorted by popularity, which creates a mess in terms of logically reading the comments in the order in which they were entered; it completely breaks the logical flow.

The ability to post at the top by replying to the first comment was valuable, and useless posts that abused that system without merit was being policed by users by down-rating and deleting said violators. Users no longer have the ability to post important information near the top of the page, and thus have a much more narrow viewing audience. Some pages have enough comments to actually cause the comments section to have multiple pages, and not many people actually view the subsequent pages.

The size of the comment rating buttons was rarely ever an issue, and the new buttons remove that issue altogether, but the new size and placement is completely alien to long-time users. It stands out like Deathwing in Goldshire when compared to the old ratings. The ratings themselves were never really important; the content of the comment was the important part, and highly-rated comments were colored so that they stood out. As it stands now, the comments don't stand out now, they're just at the top of the list.

Replies to comments no longer have the ability to be down-rated. This creates a problem, as the users who police the comments and replies no longer have the ability to remove or apply any sort of infraction to bad replies. We can't move bad replies to the bottom of the list; they are stuck on potentially good comments. From a cursory glance at the new system shows that the replies are using the same sort function as the comments themselves, still attached to the comment. Having the bad replies still attached to the comment without the ability to purge them will result in pushing the following comments further down the page, and potentially leading to follow-up replies to replies - encouraging conversation about bad replies which are still visible. The only saving grace here is that only the first five replies can be seen by default for any given comment.

Understatement: The inability for users to sort by Date instead of by Rating as an account preference is annoying. Users are essentially being forced do deal with the issues listed above on a page-to-page basis, rather than having a modicum of control via an account preference.

Comment by hatman555

on 2011-12-02T10:21:03-06:00

"how much better is a comment with 11 votes (green) than one with 9 (white)?"